Trainer Talk

Animals learn through associating environments which as we know can also be called classical conditioning. When we teach our animals a signal we associate the signal to the behaviour we want the animal to respond to. Because animals are great observers there is a very high chance that the animal Read more…

Training animals has been a passion of mine for such a long time. Practising what I learned from other trainers and from reading books has shaped me to become the trainer I am today. Zoospensefull’s main goal is to share the best practises for the animals we work with. We Read more…

Cover Photo: Libby Eyre We all know that using food reinforcers are highly effective in training our animals. We try to find their “favourite” food sources and heavily use this in our training sessions. All to increase the behaviour we would like to see. When we put this into perspective Read more…

One of the biggest challenges zoos face, is keeping animals fit in their environment. We know a lot about nutrition and body scoring but what do we know about the fitness level of our animals?  I remember at one of the zoos I worked at we started to introduce a Read more…

Over the years I have learned a lot about behaviour and why it occurs. There is always a reason a behaviour occurs, and there is often motivation connected to behaviour. The fact that there are most likely emotions, and even thoughts and feelings, coming alongside most behaviour is obvious. The Read more…

If you haven’t read “Don’t Shoot the Dog” from Karen Pryor you should! In her book on page 38 & 39 she explains the 10 laws of shaping. A great tool for the trainer to make progress with their learners. In this article I would like to add my thoughts Read more…

We can train cooperative care in many different ways, and we all know how much this training helps the animals in our care. Their welfare increases and we are able to take even better care of our animals individually. What if we take a deeper look into how we can Read more…

As animal caretakers we have to try and be proactive in different situations and scenarios. To be able to check our animals voluntary we need some basic trained behaviours. The animals often require a good relationship with the trainer and understand several foundation behaviours. But when we train for urine Read more…

Aggression is a natural and common behaviour in animals. There are many reasons why animals demonstrate aggressive behaviour to conspecifics or even towards us. When should we take action as caretakers and what is the reason the aggressor shows aggressive behaviour towards the other members of the group, other species or Read more…